Pre Tip: How to Quickly Start Universal Search

Sure, It's a little early to start posting tips and tricks about the Palm Pre, but what the heck, right? Here's an interesting one: how to get to Universal Search. See, the Pre has this excellent feature where you can just start typing and it will instantly search all of your contacts and applications and when it runs out of those, will provide you with links to search Google and Wikipedia. Sounds great, right? Well how to you get it going if you're already in an application like, say, Notes?

Matt Crowley (the man who explained the lack of MicroSD on the Pre) is answered another question over at facebook, and his answer about universal search solved our (future) conundrum quite neatly:

Matias also showed that pressing the center button, while on an active application, allows you to start Universal Search by just beginning to type on the keyboard. You can search for things on the device as well as off the device on the Internet.

I just used Universal Search yesterday when my 10 year old son asked me how fast a giraffe can go. I typed in "how fast is a giraffe?" in Universal Search and I got the San Diego Zoo's Animal Bytes results. ~34.7MP/H (56 kilometers per hour).

There you have it: to get to a spot where Universal Search will work, just tap the bottom button to go to Card View and badda-bing, what you type will be searched. Nice.